Two Pakistani students Azqa Nadeem from National University of Science & Technology (NUST) and Muhammad Ansar Iqbal from Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU) made their homeland proud at the 2015 Summer Internship Programme at CERN.

First great achievement by both these students making place among 40 young passionate graduate around the world that was filtered out from the 1,600 applicants. Azqa Nadeem got the first position and won “The Overall Best Lightning Talk 2015”. Commenting over the performance of Azqa Nadeem, CERN Computer Security Officer Stefan Luders emailed the Director General of the National Center for Physics Hafeez Hoorani, “Azqa has done a great job and succeeded in selecting one out of two methods providing good arguments why the second method is insecure and should be rejected.”

The presentation given by Azqa was selected as the best presentation during all summer student projects.

Then there was Muhammad Ansar Iqbal of QAU who worked on compact muon solenoid (CMS) which is a general purpose detector at the Large Hardon Collider. Iqbal was surprised to know that one of the detectors of the collider was assembled in Pakistan. “I was with the team to check the efficiency studies of those detectors through cosmic muon,” said Iqbal.

The supervisor of Muhammad Ansar Iqbal, Anton Dimitrov emailed Hoorani and said, “Iqbal was one of the really exceptional students who showed technical, theoretical and experimental skills which were well above the average level. He would be glad if they could continue working with him remotely.” “He was very fast and efficient in problem solving. He performed brilliantly his task to compare RE4 Construction with Operation Data.”

Pakistan formally got the membership of CERN in July 2015. This made the Pakistani first associate members of the CERN among Asian Countries. CERN is a European Organization for Nuclear Research.